After Facebook decided to restructure its page content, YouTube is following suit. This is due to the impact that detrimental and irrelevant videos have had on categorized pages. The issue is best noticed on YouTube Kids, where Logan Paul and PewDiePie videos were driving away advertisers that did not want their content being shown next to extreme video content.
PewDiePie; This is the YouTube name for Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg, a Swedish web-based comedian and video producer of let’s play commentaries and vlogs. PewDiePie is notorious for anti-Semitic and racist content, but he still managed to make $12 million from video content on YouTube during 2017!
Logan Paul; Logan Alexander Paul an American vlogger first gained fame through videos shared on the internet video service Vine. Logan Paul came under the scrutiny of YouTube when he uploaded a video of a teenager’s body after committing suicide in a forest in Japan. It was only taken down after reaching 6 million views. The use of the horrific to generate income is a major concern for YouTube, and Logan Paul certainly stepped well into this category when uploading that controversial video.
These not so young vloggers became controversial when they started to show more extreme and sometimes totally inappropriate scenes on their YouTube accounts. The fallout from viewers and advertisers was felt by YouTube when over 250 advertisers refused to use the platform since they felt their ads appeared in videos that seemed to exploit children. and they realized that it was time to restructure how they show content.
Human not Machine
The biggest change will be the employment of human censorship that will be used to view and confirm adverts being run on certain channels. According to YouTube, from March 2018, humans will be used to view the most popular video sources before they are released for public consumption. Since YouTube is an Alphabet company, it is part of the Google Preferred program that highlights 5% of the advertiser-friendly content.
Categories
The change will not bar content from being uploaded; it will just distribute the content according to specific rules. Where some content deemed inappropriate for a specific audience will be relocated to an appropriate category.
Base Line
Apart from the human viewing censorship process, starting from February 20th, channels will need to have a minimum of 1,000 subscribers and at least 4,000 hours of viewing time within the previous 12 months to run ads on their pages, sharing the income with Google. These new regulations are more restrictive from the old one, which only demanded 10,000 minimum views for running ads. YouTube intends to add spam and strikes as metrics to gauge video content integrity.
Bottom Line
These new changes will lead to over 10,000 creators from making any form of income on YouTube. While it will make content safer, the income and usage for YouTube are expected to be affected as the affected contributors will seek alternative means of income. This is actually a good solution since most of the offender’s use YouTubes algorithms to make their income from inappropriate and offensive content. Cleaning up YouTube will make it safer for parents, some of which block YouTube through parental watch software.
